Monday, November 18, 2013

Just wanted to note two things quickly. My sister grew a bunch of pumpkins for her wedding at the end of September. After the wedding we thought we would bring them back and try to sell them. It seems like our neighbors liked the idea too, because we sold almost $50 worth of them. We were selling regular sized pumpkins for $3 and tiny ones for $0.50 a piece. We just put them at the top of the hill on an honor system and it worked out pretty well.

The other thing I wanted to comment on is that, I forgot to cancel my Amazon Prime membership and it auto-renewed. We didn't use it much last year, so I was trying to find a way to cancel it and get my money back. It turns out that if you cancel the membership you get a prorated amount back, and since it just renewed we are getting the whole $79 back. I think it is really nice of them to do that, they could have said the membership is for a year and you can cancel it then.

Monday, November 4, 2013

I received a letter from Comcast saying that they were going to be sending us some boxes so that we could continue to receive the basic cable service that we pay for. I kind of like not needing to have a box and we have adjusted just fine to only having 4 channels that we watch on TV. We have a number of TV's in the house so it will be inconvenient to have to hook up boxes to each one.

Apparently this is the result of a recent court ruling that allows the cable companies to encrypt their basic channel offering, which up till now had been illegal. Since we live in a metro area, over the air (OTA) will probably work for us. Also, if I can find a neighbor to share internet with I might bid adieu to Comcast entirely. I got an old antenna that my dad had been using, but it was kind of in pieces. I tore out the rotate mechanism since all the signals come from one direction (and it seemed broken), and soldered the wires to the old coax circuit (just the connector, the old circuit carried power for rotating the antenna as well). We get most of the channels, but if I split the signal I get none. So I need to find a pre-amp. Recommendations?